ITP - 95: Jenna, Guadalajara, and Teaching Abroad in Mexico

Greg: This is Greg coming to you from the International Teacher Podcast, and I do have JP Mint. How are you doing, JP, in Mexico?

Jacqueline: Hello, hello. It is a balmy 30 degrees here in Mexico.

Greg: And I’ve got Kent the Cat Guy. How are you doing, Kent?

Kent: Great, great. Great to see you. Thanks for having me.

Greg: And our guest this episode is Jenna Slack Larimer, and she’s coming to us from Guadalajara, Mexico. How are you doing, Jenna?

Jenna: I’m great. How are you guys?

Greg: Awesome possum. Are you close to JP Mint? Give us a little geography here.

Jacqueline: No, she’s about five hours driving inland, and we’re a little bit closer to the Pacific coast. Guadalajara is about four hours inland from Puerto Vallarta.

Greg: It’s in the same state though.

Jacqueline: Yeah.

Greg: Okay, I haven’t been. Kent, have you ever been to Mexico?

Kent: Sure. Baja and Tijuana. These are all familiar.

Greg: Jenna, you come originally from Chicago, right?

Jenna: Yeah.

Greg: Oh, that’s too bad. I feel bad for all you Packer fans out there. We can’t help it, but we do have to have a Chicago person every once in a while.

Jenna: The Bears.

Greg: The Bears.

Jenna: My stepfather’s a Packers fan, so I’ve made peace with it.

Greg: I like him already.

Greg: Jenna, what takes you from the Windy City, Chicago to Mexico?

Jenna: Oh man, it’s a winding story.

Greg: We love winding stories. That’s all we do around here.

Jenna: Yeah, going through life how it happened. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and started teaching in Detroit. I didn’t like being that far away from my family, so I came back and taught in Chicago for seven years.

I was never really planning on leaving or going international, but we have a lot of Spanish-speaking immigration in the city, so it’s way easier to get and keep teaching jobs if you have a bilingual teaching license.

I had a special education license, and I had my ESL license. I knew how to speak Spanish in theory, but I couldn’t really get the flow of it.

So I decided one summer I was just going to spend the entire break in the closest Spanish-speaking country I could get to for the least amount of money, and I ended up in Guadalajara.

Greg: I love that. That is a roaring recommendation for Mexico—closest and cheapest.

Jenna: That’s how I got here.

Greg: What year did you pack things up and end up in Mexico?

Jenna: Well, I came for the summer. That was the summer of 2018. I stayed and found this cute little Spanish language school for foreigners in a suburb of Guadalajara called Tlaquepaque. It was great. I had a great time and loved my teacher at that school. We became really close friends.

Then I left because of work and went back to Chicago, started the new school year, took the licensure tests, and passed.

Then I decided for the weekend of November first and second, which in Mexico is a big holiday—Day of the Dead—I wanted to go back. I had studied it in my Spanish language and culture classes, but I had never actually been in Mexico for it.

So I decided I was going to go back and spend the weekend and celebrate with my teacher, who was now my friend. It was that weekend that I met who is now my husband, and that helped keep me coming back to Guadalajara a little bit more.

Jenna: So from 2018, that was November, so 2018 to 2019, he and I were kind of dating via WhatsApp.

Then the pandemic hit, and my school district in Chicago announced that we would not be going back to in-person classes. My rent contract was up, my landlord wanted to sell, and it was kind of this mishmash of signs from the universe.

So I said, screw it. I threw everything in a storage locker and went to Guadalajara. I lived in an Airbnb for what I thought would be two or three weeks, and then I would come home and find another apartment.

But it ended up being a year and a half, as we all know.

Then the school district said, okay, for the next school year we’re going back to in-person classes. At that point, we were engaged. I was very in love with him and his family and didn’t want to leave.

So I serendipitously met a very tall New Zealander.

Greg: Not me.

Jenna: Not you. This was before.

Greg: Jacqueline?

Jenna: I was like, I’m like raving your arms.

Greg: I wasn’t. I’m like, tall New Zealander? That doesn’t describe me.

Jenna: But anyway, he happened to be married to a Canadian who happened to be the cousin of the Canadian school’s director who hired me and Jacqueline in the same year.

Greg: And that’s how you came into each other’s worlds.

Jacqueline: That was a Canadian international school.

Jenna: Yeah, it’s a Mexican school in Guadalajara, but they teach the Canadian curriculum and they hire Canadian teachers. It’s about 60 percent Mexican staff and 40 percent Canadian.

Greg: So Jenna, what did you teach in Chicago and then what did you teach when you started teaching in Mexico?

Jenna: Everything in both. In Chicago, because I have a special education license and teach in high school, I was on the south sides and the west sides where we have really diverse learning populations.

They would throw me in any class. I was co-teaching physics and world history and English and all of the things.

But my teaching license says English, Spanish, bilingual, ESL, and special education. I basically just jump in and help teach whatever needs to be taught.

Then when I got here, I wasn’t formally looking for a job. I was actually looking for an apartment for my now husband. He had been staying with me in the Airbnb, and I was moving back to Chicago, so we were looking for a place for him in Guadalajara.

The rental ads online aren’t super trustworthy, so we gave up and started knocking on doors that had for rent signs out, and some that didn’t.

We would just say, hey, do you want to rent this place?

Greg: Knocking on the door, hello, hi, we know you don’t have a sign, but can we move in?

Jenna: We were in an area we really liked, so we were just looking for signs. I knocked on this gate, and a man in the house next door came out.

He said his wife was a teacher and that they were moving around the block so their kids could have a bigger backyard. He said we could come in and look at the house.

While we were touring, I was thinking there was no way he could afford this house by himself. It was a four-bedroom house.

But we were being polite and chatting with his wife, who was the teacher. She said her cousin was the director at a school and they really needed a third grade teacher.

Greg: Really bad.

Jenna: Really bad. And this was early July.

I said, I am not your person. I do not do the little ones.

Greg: I didn’t think that’s where the story was going.

Jenna: I like teenage angst. I like fart jokes. I can’t do the baby songs all the time.

But I really wanted to stay with my husband, who also likes fart jokes.

So I took the job and taught third grade for a year, and it was really fun. They are a fun group.

Greg: Like they are a fun group. I probably couldn’t handle any higher than third grade because then the cute goes down and the annoying goes up.

Kent: You mean you can’t go lower than fifth grade?

Jenna: I haven’t ever done it.

Greg: Where’s the level of fart jokes that you want?

Kent: Is it like middle school fart jokes?

Jenna: I mean, there’s that zone in there—fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh—where it’s less cute and more attitude. It dips until it rises back again in high school.

Greg: Exactly.

Jenna: There’s a filter that kicks in around the end of ninth grade where you don’t have to deal with quite as much of the “what the hell” as in middle school, but there’s still a lot of funny.

Teaching is not boring. It’s hard, it’s stressful, but it is not boring.

Jacqueline: I want to interject here and say I checked out Jenna’s classroom. I was working at the other campus in the secondary school, but Jenna and I got to know each other during onboarding.

Greg loves talking about onboarding, and with reason, because it’s so important. This is what happened—Jen and I became besties. We just clicked.

I think the fact that she was at another campus helped, but also she was just cool. Easy to talk to. We hit it off.

But what I got out of her classroom was the most sophisticated grade three classroom you can imagine. It was like a cityscape—black construction paper with midnight blue behind it.

This was the most far-from-primary classroom you can imagine. No red, yellow, blue. This was the coolest, most epic grade three classroom I’ve ever seen.

Jenna: It was a Chicago cityscape.

Jacqueline: It was.

Jenna: There’s a funny story behind that. I took the job at the end of July, and it’s the beginning of August, and I’m meeting with the other third grade teachers.

They’re all really into themes. And I’m kind of like, tell me what to teach. Where are the standards? Where’s the course map?

But none of that. It’s more like, I’m doing the ocean this year, I’m doing the jungle this year.

And I went home crying. My husband tells this story better. I’m crying to him saying I don’t know how to make sloths out of construction paper.

He listened, bless his heart. His English is very good, but when I’m sobbing about sloths, he didn’t have the vocabulary for that yet.

Greg: Most men wouldn’t understand that no matter the language.

Jenna: Exactly. So I just decided to be myself. I made a Chicago theme. I spent way too much time building a six-foot skyline with the Sears Tower, the Prudential building, and the Bean.

I made a bean table with foil. It was ugly, but it worked.

Greg: As long as the kids go “oh wow,” that’s what matters.

Jenna: Exactly. My reading groups were hot dogs, pizza, cinnamon rolls, and popcorn. My math groups were sports teams.

Greg: The Bears must have been the low group.

Jenna: There are no lower groups in reading.

Greg: Someone had to be the White Sox.

Jenna: Actually, the Bulls were the lowest.

Greg: I applaud you for taking that year in third grade. It’s not easy to go into elementary when your background is secondary.

Jenna: Yeah, I learned a lot. I had a great teacher next door, Chelsea, who was amazing.

She had a jungle theme every year and just added to it. I was more chaos compared to her system.

Greg: So after that year, did you stay?

Jenna: I did. They hired me as an instructional coach for upper grades. But that year was complicated. I ended up covering a seventh grade math position for the first semester.

Then in second semester, I taught ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade math to small groups of students who had failed their courses.

Greg: How were the fart jokes there?

Jenna: Much better.

Greg: That’s a great example of international teaching—you end up teaching everything.

Jenna: Exactly. You learn as you go.

Greg: And that’s the beauty of it. You’re teaching small groups, but you’re still prepping like it’s a full class.

Jenna: Yeah, exactly. You’re still learning the material, planning lessons, and making sure the students get what they need.

Kent: And hopefully not the day before.

Jenna: Hopefully not, but sometimes it happens.

Jacqueline: I have to make fun of Kent because we’re in the same hallway and we see each other scrambling sometimes. We support each other with coffee in the mornings.

But you should see Kent’s classroom. The kids love him. He has a great connection with them.

Greg: There are teachers like that. The kids love them, and that matters.

Kent: I don’t know how much they learn, but they love me.

Jacqueline: No, you’re a great teacher.

Greg: Jenna, are you still at the same school?

Jenna: No, I’ve moved on. I wanted to get back to my wheelhouse, so I applied to another international school in the same city.

There was an opening for tenth grade English, which is what my license says I should be teaching, so I took it.

Greg: And where are you now?

Jenna: I’m at the American School Foundation of Guadalajara.

Greg: Nice.

Jenna: Yeah, it’s my first year there, and I’m really enjoying it. I have a great group of students, and the staff has been really welcoming.

Greg: That’s awesome.

Kent: And it’s a bigger, more established school, right?

Jenna: Yeah, bigger student body, more resources, more institutional experience. It’s harder to get into, but it’s been a great move.

Greg: And you’re still in Guadalajara.

Jenna: Yes.

Greg: So when you made that move within the same city, did you get a local package or an international package?

Jenna: I got the international package, which is not common.

Greg: Did you have to leave the country or go to a job fair for that?

Jenna: No, I was already here. It was partly luck and partly strategy.

I had applied for jobs back in Chicago and actually had an offer. I was able to show that to the school and say, if you don’t hire me, I’m going back.

That helped. Also, I’m not a permanent resident yet, so I still needed a work visa.

Greg: That makes a difference.

Jenna: Yeah, so I was technically an international hire. I wouldn’t have stayed if they didn’t hire me.

Greg: That’s a big win.

Jacqueline: It really is. The difference between a local and international package can be huge—housing, salary, benefits.

Greg: Exactly.

Jacqueline: A lot of countries pay local staff in local currency, and international staff might be paid in USD or another foreign currency. That can be a big difference.

Greg: Housing is a big one too. Even if the cost of living is lower, you don’t want to be paying out of pocket for housing if you don’t have to.

Jenna: Yeah, and ASFG actually has kind of a middle ground. They still pay on the international scale, but they remove things like housing and flights if you’re already local.

Greg: That’s still a win.

Kent: Definitely.

Greg: So what is life like in Guadalajara? When people ask you why you love it, what do you say?

Jenna: First, my husband.

Greg: That’s a good answer.

Jenna: Guadalajara kind of has everything. It’s a big city, but not the biggest, which I think is why it feels comfortable for me coming from Chicago.

It has that second-city vibe. It’s not Mexico City, it’s not Monterrey, but it has its own identity.

There’s a lot of culture. This is where mariachi music was born. This is where tequila comes from.

They have theater, dance, shows, malls, parks, art—everything you’d want in a big city.

But you can also drive an hour and be in the mountains or forests, and a few hours later you’re at the ocean.

Greg: That’s a pretty good combination.

Jenna: Yeah, you can do all-inclusive resorts or you can sleep in a hammock on the beach. There’s a lot of variety.

Kent: I like the hammock idea.

Greg: Just make sure the dog is only sniffing your toes.

Jenna: Exactly.

Greg: So looking ahead, do you see yourself staying there long term?

Jenna: For now, yes. But there’s a visa situation that we have to think about.

My husband has a tourist visa for the U.S., and it’s valid for ten years. We’re about halfway through that.

When it expires, there’s a chance it might not be renewed, and that could make it difficult for us to travel back to the U.S. to see my family.

Greg: That’s a real consideration.

Jenna: Yeah, so we’re thinking that at some point we might go to the U.S. for a period of time so he can get residency and eventually citizenship.

That would make things easier long term for travel and future decisions.

Kent: That makes sense.

Jenna: After that, we’re open. Maybe we stay in Mexico, maybe we go somewhere else internationally.

Greg: That’s the international teacher mindset.

Greg: That’s the international teacher mindset.

Kent: And you mentioned earlier that your husband likes to travel too, right?

Jenna: Yeah, he does. His brother is actually a travel agent and is in Thailand right now, so travel is definitely part of his family culture.

Greg: That helps.

Jenna: Yeah, he enjoys learning about new places and experiencing different cultures. But when I ask him if he wants to live somewhere else, he’s not always sure what he would do there.

Greg: That’s fair.

Kent: Before we wrap up, we have a couple of standard questions.

Jenna: Okay.

Kent: What are three things you need to take with you when you move to a new place?

Jenna: Your Google Drive. It’s a treasure trove of everything. I still use materials from years ago. I tweak them and build on them.

There’s no shame in hoarding resources as a teacher.

Also, bring your teaching identity—your experiences, your values, what got you into teaching in the first place.

And then practical things—comfortable shoes and your passport. Don’t lose it, don’t wash it.

Greg: Sounds like there’s a story there.

Jenna: I may have washed my passport.

Greg: That happens more than people think.

Kent: Second question—do you have a police or customs story?

Jenna: Not really anything dramatic. Nothing bad has ever happened to me at a border.

Greg: That’s good.

Jenna: I did have one experience back in college in Costa Rica. A group of us were on the beach, roasting hot dogs over a fire.

The police showed up and thought we were hunting turtle eggs. They rounded everyone up and put us in the back of a truck.

We eventually figured out what was going on, and they let us go once they realized we weren’t doing anything illegal.

Greg: That’s a good story.

Kent: That counts.

Greg: Jenna, any final words for listeners who are thinking about going overseas or maybe even to Mexico?

Jenna: Mexico is a lot of fun. The weather is great, there’s always something to do, and it’s close to the U.S., which makes it easier to visit family.

If being far away is a concern, Mexico can be a great option.

Greg: That’s a great point.

Kent: Jenna, thank you so much for joining us.

Jenna: Thank you for having me.

Greg: And thank you to our listeners. We’ll see you next time.

All: Thank you.